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“... Keith and Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards ...”

“... crude rhetoric and subtle drama.’ Hardy’s extended discussions of the deaths of Nell and Paul Dombey are every bit as intelligent as Stewart’s, and designed to make a quite opposite point about troughs and peaks in Dickensian artistry. The terms ‘form’ and ‘feeling’ have been refrains in Hardy’s criticism for the last ten years. Her ...”

“... Suddenly we are in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.Drain may have become the Westboro Baptists’ St Paul – the convert who stiffens the creed and seizes control – but he is a ludicrous figure even by Westboro standards. You can watch him and one of the uncles on YouTube, being nimbly tormented by Russell Brand: two pudgy doofuses you’d think twice about ...”

“... as if for this dionysian release that never came, I thought of the Salt Lake City scholar Paul Shepard’s claim that Yahweh was originally a Semitic storm god. I also felt for the first time something of the beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God, and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the ...”

“... and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies ...”

“... what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These movie actors, whatever else they happen to be, are works of animation: they can make their faces, and their emotions, do anything, and they live their on-screen ...”

“... story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not easily associated ...”

“... Simpson said on Panorama. ‘It’s off the scale of everybody’s belief system,’ said the DJ Paul Gambaccini. But it is our belief system. And now it is part of the same system to blame Savile. He’s dead, anyway. Let’s blame him for all the things he obviously was, and blame him for a host of other things we don’t understand, such as how we love ...”

“... you’re the one trying to hold it together or the one who’s trying to prise the sides apart.Paul Gilroy – one of Hall’s many illustrious former students – suspects it was frustration with New Labour, and what it did to left politics, that led Hall in the 1990s to spend more and more time working on ‘less depressing’ Black Arts projects ...”

“... a discourse on culture as if Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, Kristeva, Barthes and Foucault, Williams, Eagleton and many others had never existed. My intellectual disagreements with Peter Fuller in the last years of his life turned on his espousal of this complacency, his attempt to give some theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment ...”

“... read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library of America edition of Stevens; or from the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A ...”

“... pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline. Gavin L. is en route for Tangier to see Paul Bowles. I say that Bowles must be quite old now. ‘Yes,’ says Gavin, ‘82.’ ‘That’s not so old,’ says Lindsay. ‘Well it’s a funny age, 82,’ says Gavin. ‘I’ve known several people of 82 who haven’t made it to 83.’ I don’t think ...”

“... he could inspire extreme affection in people. But too soon they would feel, as William Carlos Williams wrote, ‘uncomfortable’ with his ‘roaring boy, predatory reputation’. It seemed that nothing could contain him, except his poetry. So when the poetry stopped, in a very real sense he had nowhere to go. Like the visionary company that he emulated ...”

“... and a fan – even more remarkably – of William Godwin’s English Jacobin thriller, Caleb Williams. It was quite possible to combine Enlightened criticism of the Ancien Régime with a counter-revolutionary hostility to the politics of perfectibility. The quest for a political utopia provided scope not only for the amelioration of human distress, but ...”

“... more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to explain that for ...”